Potential Markup and Editing Choices

Question and answer entry will be arguably the most crucial piece of stackoverflow. I used the post Is HTML a Humane Markup Language? as a form of collaborative research to determine what our Q&A; editor should look like. Based on the (extensive!) feedback, I’ve reached three conclusions:

Good programmers never write what they can steal or borrow. With that in mind, I did some research and found the promising but unfortunately named WMD: The Wysiwym Markdown Editor from AttackLab.

I emailed AttackLab and John Fraser was kind enough to respond with a code drop. Apparently there’s going to be an open source release at http://wmd.googlecode.com/ any day now — it will also include a post-processing callback we can use to do syntax highlighting. Here’s a demo someone hacked together using WMD and a syntax highlighter:

Adopting tools like these means we’d be very intimately tied to JavaScript on the client, of course, but it’s hard for me to see how that’s a problem on today’s web.

What do you think of these solutions? Would they work for you when posting programming questions and answers on stackoverflow?